A complex system such as an aircraft may be generally composed of a number of systems, and enable functionality greater than their individual systems. Technological advances in many complex systems including aircraft and others such as those in the aerospace, automotive, marine, medical and electronics industries have led to numerous mutually-dependent systems, at least some of which may be designed by different teams from different companies in different geographical locations. Analysis of failures or malfunctions of one or more of these systems is often required as part of a certification process. Typically such analyses are manually performed by groups of system analysts, without reference to a process capable of facilitating such analyses. As complex systems and the systems of which they are composed become more integrated, traditional analysis methods may no longer be practical in terms of breadth of coverage and labor costs involved.
There are a number of safety analysis practices in the aerospace industry. For example, fault tree analysis (FTA) is top-down analysis in which the causes of a failure effect are analyzed using deductive logic (e.g., Boolean logic) that combines contributing failures. Fault propagation modeling (FPM) is a process of developing a model (fault propagation model) that captures information about fault propagation across systems. Fault propagation models are often used in model-based safety analysis (MBSA), which is an emerging practice in which the system design and safety assessment processes develop a common model that is used to automatically generate a consistent set of safety artifacts.
Therefore, it may be desirable to have a system and method that improves upon existing practices.